Thursday, January 2, 2020
Sunday, December 29, 2019
Sermon: Pharaoh and Herod vs God's Love
Matthew 2:13-23
Pharaoh and Herod vs God’s Love
James Sledge December
29, 2019
Every
evening when I drive home at this time of year, I pass by a house with an
elaborate nativity scene in the front yard. It’s not terribly realistic, but it
is huge, covering half of the front yard. It has steps that go up to the floor
where Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus are, along with wise men and some
animals.
The
holy family and their visitors are wooden, stylized figures, illuminated by strands
of Christmas lights. But on those steps leading up to the floor are two more
realistic figures. They are plastic, brightly colored, and glow from their own,
interior lighting. One is Santa Claus and the other is a snowman, Frosty
perhaps?
A
little odd, I suppose, but it’s hardly the first time I’ve seen Santa and the
manger side by side. I don’t suppose anyone actually thinks that Santa was
there at Jesus’ birth, but I can understand why people might add Santa to the
display. In popular imagination, the story of Jesus’ birth is a joyous, magical,
miraculous story, often depicted as sweet and idyllic, something straight out
of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Likewise
the story of Santa is also joyous and miraculous. It is full of warmth and
happiness and a sense of magic that even adults long for. It is easy to see why
people would feel that the two stories go well together.
It
may surprise some, considering all the attention we lavish on it, to realize
how little coverage the Christmas story gets from the Bible. Of the four
gospels, only Luke tells of Jesus in a manger. There’s no actual mention of a
stable, and many scholars think this manger was inside a home, in the area
where the animals were brought inside at night.
If
the nativity display at your house is like the one at mine, the Wise Men are
visiting the baby in the manger along with shepherds and angels. But the visit
of the Magi doesn’t quite belong with Christmas. Young Jesus is likely a
toddler in this story from Matthew’s gospel, a story that ends with the
fearsome, frightening events from our scripture reading this morning. All the male
children two years old and under in the little hamlet of Bethlehem are taken
from their parents by government officials, and then killed.
The gospel writer borrows a line from
the prophet Jeremiah to describe the scene. The words originally spoke
metaphorically of the children of Israel carried off into exile while Rachel,
one of Israel’s founding matriarchs, weeps for them. But now the metaphor has
turned literal. “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud
lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled,
because they are no more.”
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Sermon: The Threat of Christmas
Matthew 1:18-25
The Threat of Christmas
James Sledge December
22, 2019
Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and
unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. “A righteous
man.” Outside of the Bible, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone actually
described that way. Have you? I can’t think of a single example. For that
matter, I almost never hear the word righteous at all, other than to speak disparagingly
of someone who is “self-righteous.”
Some
Bible translations try something else: a just man, a man of honor, a noble man,
a good man. Unlike righteous, I’ve heard people described as good, noble, honorable,
or just, and meant in a complimentary way. Righteous, however, just isn’t part
of our everyday vocabulary. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that any of those other
words quite capture what the gospel writer is trying to say.
To
say that Joseph is a righteous man is to say that he is faithful in keeping
God’s law. He is more than simply good. He lives his life by God’s
commandments. He is guided by the principles laid out in the Torah, and Torah
says he should divorce Mary.
Divorce
is required because Mary’s engagement to Joseph is something very different from
engagement in our day. When two people get engaged in our culture, they have
declared their intent to marry, but there’s no legal change of status. They are
still single and, should they call off the engagement, the only issues to
navigate depend on how far along things are. It could be a simple as letting
friends and family know that the wedding is off. Or it could involve unbooking
reception venues and dealing with angry members of the wedding party who’ve
already bought bridesmaid dresses or non-refundable airline tickets. But
regardless of how easy or complicated, calling the wedding off doesn’t require
any legal action to undo the engagement.
Not
the case for Joseph and Mary. Their engagement is as legally binding as
marriage is for us. It cannot be called off. It can only end with a divorce.
I
can only imagine what goes through Joseph’s mind when he learns that Mary is
pregnant. He might feel betrayed, although if this is an arranged marriage,
perhaps not. In the eyes of the Law, however, Joseph has been wronged. He has
made Mary his wife, even if the final formalities are yet to come, but now that
Joseph has learned of her presumed adultery, he must divorce her, regardless of
what he does or doesn’t feel for her.
Thursday, December 19, 2019
Sunday, December 8, 2019
Sermon: Needing John (and Accountability) for Advent
Matthew 3:1-12
Needing John (and Accountability) for Advent
James Sledge December
8, 2019
Many
of you are aware that the Scripture passages used in worship each week come
from something called a lectionary, in our case the Revised Common Lectionary.
This is a published list of readings for each Sunday, typically with a reading
from the Old Testament, a psalm, a passage from an epistle or letter, and a
gospel reading. We never use all the readings, but on most Sundays, we use some
of them.
The
lectionary follows a three year cycle, imaginatively titled years A, B, and C.
Year A features the Gospel of Matthew, year B, Mark, and year C, Luke. The
Gospel of John doesn’t get a year but gets woven into all three. As we entered
into Advent last Sunday, we transitioned from Year C to A, and so we hear from
Matthew today.
If you looked at all the passages listed
in the lectionary for Advent, you might be surprised to discover that none
sound very Christmassy until the gospel reading on December 22. And John the
Baptist shows up on both the second and third Sunday in Advent. A person
unfamiliar with church who happened to wander into our worship on those Sundays
could be forgiven for suspecting that we didn’t realize what time of year it
was. Do we really need to hear from John
so much and so close to Christmas?
Monday, December 2, 2019
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Sermon: Advent, Eschatology, and Moral Arcs
Isaiah 2:1-5
Advent, Eschatology, and Moral Arcs
James Sledge December
1, 2019
Recently
I’ve seen a number of articles and posts on social media commemorating thirty
years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. What a momentous time. The Soviet
Union collapsed. East and West Germany became one country. Former puppet
regimes began new lives as independent nations. And people heralded the end of
the Cold War.
There
was great hope for the future and talk of a “peace dividend.” America was the
sole remaining superpower, and many hoped that military spending could be
curtailed, allowing increased funding for social programs, education,
infrastructure projects, and so on.
There
were reductions in nuclear arsenals. Military spending remained flat for a few
years, but no big peace dividend materialized. After 9/11, military spending increased
dramatically, and we’ve been in an endless “war on terror” ever since. Now
Russia’s war in Ukraine and interference in US elections feels a little like a
return to Cold War days.
Through
much of history, hopes for peace often seem to disappear like mist burned away
by the morning sun. “Peace on Earth” will soon by plastered all over Christmas
cards and Christmas displays, but our hopes for peace always seem to get
overwhelmed by our tendency towards violence and war.
Back
in 1928, France, the US, and Germany signed something called the “General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an
Instrument of National Policy,” better known as the “Kellogg-Briand
Pact.” By the time the treaty went into effect a year later, the majority of
the world’s nations had signed it, including all the major players in World War
II, which would begin only ten years later.
Sunday, November 24, 2019
Sermon: Failing the Cowboy Test
Luke 23:33-43
Failing the Cowboy
Test
James Sledge November
24, 2019
I was sitting on the couch
watching television the other night. More accurately, I was looking for
something to watch. I pulled up the channel guide and scrolled through it, but
nothing really grabbed me. As I got to the very end, I saw a listing that read
simply, “Cheyenne.”
I used to watch a show called
Cheyenne when I was a little boy, and so I clicked on it to see if it was that.
Sure enough, there, in beautiful black and white, was Clint Walker starring as
Cheyenne Bodie.
Now I suspect that many of you
have never heard of either Cheyenne Bodie or the actor who played him, but the
show was a huge success when it aired from the mid-1950s to early 60s. According
to Wikipedia, it was the first hour-long Western and the first hour-long
dramatic series of any sort to last more than a single season.
Cheyenne was a large and muscular, but a gentle fellow, at least until someone needed justice. Then he was more than willing to use his brawn, or his gun, to set things right.
Cheyenne was a large and muscular, but a gentle fellow, at least until someone needed justice. Then he was more than willing to use his brawn, or his gun, to set things right.
Cowboy heroes were all over the
television when I was a boy, both in afternoon reruns and in primetime. There
were many variations in the slew of Westerns that filled the airways, but in
most all of them, the dramatic climax of the show came when good defeated evil
in a fist fight or a gunfight. Good put evil in its place, and, for a moment at
least, things were right with the world again.
My and many others’ notions of
heroism and bravery and masculinity were shaped by Cheyenne and the Lone Ranger
and Marshall Dillon and Roy Rogers and on and on and on. These heroes weren’t
afraid to fight for what they believed in, even when the odds were against
them. A real hero, a real man, might not want to fight, but he was more than
ready to do so in order to defend himself or others.
I wonder if this isn’t one reason
that so many of us Christians struggle with following Jesus. He asks us to live
in ways that are contrary to accepted notions of strength, of bravery, of
masculinity, of might and right. He tells us not to fight back. He tells us to
love our enemy. He says not to seek restitution when someone takes something
from us.
Jesus fails miserably at the
cowboy test, the superhero test. Yes, he does best his opponents in verbal
repartee on a regular basis, but when push comes to shove, he refuses to fight
back. When he is arrested, he goes meekly. When people give false testimony at
his trial, he makes no attempt to defend himself. When he is convicted for
being a political threat to the empire, he raises no objection. No wonder that
when the risen Jesus comes along a pair of his disciples on the afternoon of
that first Easter, they say of him, “But we had hoped that he was the one…” They
had hoped, but clearly he was not. If he had been, he would not have gone down
without a fight. If he had been, it wouldn’t have ended like this.
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Sermon: Saying "Yes" to God's New Day
Isaiah 65:17-25
Saying “Yes” to God’s New Day
James Sledge November
17, 2019
A
few weeks ago, one of my Facebook “friends” posted this on her page. “When the
time changes next weekend could we please go back to 1965 when life was
simple!!!!! I think most will agree the 60’s were the best years of their
life!!!”
“Most” here obviously doesn’t include anyone born
after 1970. It might not include those who served or lost loved ones in
Vietnam. It’s probably doesn’t include civil rights marchers who faced dogs,
fire hoses, beatings, and death threats. But for many, including an eight year
old me, it did seem a wonderful, simple time. We lived what I thought was the
nearly idyllic life of a typical suburban family. Oh, for life to be that easy
again.
Nostalgia
is a way that many of us react when things are not going as well as we’d like. As
with my Facebook “friend,” it usually involves some selective remembering that
focuses on the good and forgets the bad. Those who want to make America great
again, recall a time when American was in its ascendency, the preeminent
superpower with a growing middle class, burgeoning suburbs, and an interstate
highway system beginning to be built. Of course this nostalgia forgets the large
numbers of people who were systemically excluded because of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.
It forgets the ecological damage being done without the least bit of concern.
There’s
a lot of nostalgia in the church these days. Remember when the sanctuary was
always full? Remember when the confirmation class had forty youth in it?
Remember when we couldn’t find enough rooms for all the Sunday School classes?
Remember?
Of
course nostalgia forgets that 1950s Christianity often actively supported laws
enforcing racial segregation and criminalizing sexual orientations or behaviors
seen as “deviant,” The Church gave religious sanction to American society,
speaking in biblical terms of a new Jerusalem, in exchange for the culture all
but requiring people to participate in religion. But it was an easier time to
be church, although Jesus did say that following him would be difficult.
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
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